Biography

Born in White Plains, New York in 1956, Kaufman studied Art History at Barnard College, where she received her B.A. in 1978. She returned to school almost a decade later and earned a B.F.A. in drawing from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1990. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions at Mills College Museum in Oakland, the Traywick Gallery in Berkeley, and the American Institute of Architects in Oakland. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at institutions including the Palo Alto Art Center, the Monterey Museum of Art, and the SFMOMA Rental Gallery. She was also included in SJMA’s 2001 exhibition First Impressions, Prints from Paulson Press, and is currently a part of the Koret gallery exhibition Visible Rhythm. Kaufman’s work is held in several public and private collections, including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, San Francisco; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and the San Jose Museum of Art. This will be the second piece by Kaufman to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

Berkeley painter Amy Kaufman blends distinct formality and bold pictorial energy to create pattern-based abstractions that are both engaging and mysterious. Her images conjure multivalent visual associations through her manipulation of the formal qualities of shape, line, and color. Her paintings, which are loosely inspired by the forms of nature, embrace irregularity and variation and as a result her softly rendered patterns reverberate with visual harmony. Like the repeated notes, chords, and melodies of a musical composition, Kaufman’s richly painted surfaces generate dynamic, visible rhythms through their carefully orchestrated design and their studied manipulation of compositional elements.

Kaufman’s interest in art was sparked at an early age. Born in White Plains, New York, and raised in New York City, she took extracurricular art classes after school and visited prominent museums and galleries. She studied art history and architecture at Barnard College in the mid-1970s and found work at an architectural firm following graduation in 1978, but eventually realized that her passion lay elsewhere. Discontented with the rigidity of architectural drawing, Kaufman turned her focus to more intuitive creative expressions. In the late 1980s she returned to school at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), where she graduated with distinction in 1990 with a B.F.A. in drawing. Although Kaufman is best known for her abstractions, her earliest paintings were representational. As a student at CCAC, she gradually developed an interest in landscape painting; however, even her most deliberate representations tended toward abstraction. Kaufman recalls making a series of drawings using wavelike lines that unintentionally imitated the visible patterns on the surface of water. These wavy lines eventually gave way to the horizontal and vertical markings that now characterize the artist’s work.

In the four-panel painting Ice and Shoots (2002), Kaufman repeats soft vertical lines to capture the energy of the organic world. Rendered in an unusual palette of spring green, ice blue, black, and white, the painting resonates with visual intensity. Kaufman builds thin layers of paint, allowing each tier to show through, in order to capture the structural variation and subtle shifts of color that occur in nature. Her delicate layering of hues creates the illusion of simplicity so that what at first appears to be straightforward, upon close inspection becomes subtle and complex. In order to enhance this effect, Kaufman maintains a consistent palette throughout the work while using a variety of color combinations in each of the four canvases. The transition between the hues in each section is fluid—the edges of the vertical lines blend softly together, creating what Mills College Art Museum Curator Keith Lachowicz called “a soft-focus pattern that seems to flutter with optical vibration.”1 The repeating striations cause the canvas to pulsate with rhythm, much like recurring notes establish cadence in music.

Composition and control also figure strongly into Ice and Shoots. The structure of the work, loosely alluding to the forms of nature, suggests the artist’s concern with symmetry and balance. The consistent width and seemingly calculated placement of line reflects her intuitive sense of order, while her use of four canvases, hung side by side, reiterates the overall structure of the work. Kaufman’s use of multiple panels also imbues the painting with a feeling of physicality and presence; though the sections may stand alone, when viewed together they become part of a larger whole.

While Kaufman’s manipulation of line and color are essential to her interpretation of the complex structures and patterns of nature, the overall arrangement of the work also plays a key role. Through her elegant handling of formal elements, Kaufman explores the ways in which nature can act as a point of departure for the exploration of abstraction and the examination of the elaborate relationship between shape and color. —L.W.

1. Keith Lachowicz, Amy Kaufman: Drawings and Paintings, exh. brochure (Oakland, Calif.: Mills College Art Museum, 2000). (SJMA Selections publication, 2004)
Lives and works in Berkeley, California.

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